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What the heck are Capital Gains?

Okay, I am about to plead ignorance on this one. I have been hearing about these things for years and years and to be honest never really understand what these people were talking about so I decided to look it up and see what the deal was.

A capital gains apparently is a profit made on things like stocks, bonds, precious metals and property. So basically, things that you buy and sell at a profit.

So here is what I don’t understand. Aren’t individuals and corporations already taxed on their income? Why differentiate between regular income and capital gains income? That does not make sense to me. I guess in reading about them, I am opposes to capital gains tax because it is redundant and stupid.

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6 thoughts on “What the heck are Capital Gains?”

Yes you pay taxes on income and then pay for the house and as the house appreciates you will pay taxes on the gain in value if you sell.Or you take your income and buy stocks and they gain and again you pay on the gain.The income tax was enacted for corporations and then expanded to include us.Bad tax law.

The capital gains tax is mostly for rich people. In that, it’s a great thing. Anyone that makes more in a year than the three of us will make in our entire lives COMBINED should be paying a higher tax rate.

What cutting capital gains taxes means is that the rich get to keep more of their money. But the budget isn’t cut, so that money has to be made up somewhere. Where? Well, it sure won’t be by raising the taxes on rich people. It usually comes from cutting funding that helps poorer people, such as PELL grants, WIC, Food Stamps, and arts funding.

Well as much as I don’t really don’t care about the rich people having to pay their fair share, and capital gains may be mostly for the rich, there are other people that aren’t quite as rich that might be getting affected by this.

I think that we have enough money in the system without the capital gains tax to pay for all of these programs. The problem is the powers that be are not distributing it among those programs correctly. And if cuts really needed to be made, it should not be with those programs (WIC, food stamps, Pell grants, etc..), it should be in defense spending.